thoughts on a 30/30 (pt. 2)
from the Tortured Poets Department (...not)
Using all these old pictures—of my typewriters, my journals, me with a typewriter, me writing in my journal—as promos for this newsletter briefly made me feel like I was on some you-know-who Tortured Poets Department bullshit. (There’s a video ad of you-know-who at a typewriter that is fucking inescapable on Tumblr right now. On the mobile app, anyway. When I’m at my computer I use Firefox and have an ad-blocker. Thank god.) And that made me mad because like, I have been taking photos of my typewriters and journals and me sitting with them for literal decades now. You want tortured poetry, T.? I’ll show you tortured poetry…
Speaking of being a tortured poet, today we’re getting into one of the blocks I’ve hit during my 30/30 this month. And that’s the one where it’s like “oh my god, will I ever stop writing about this same topic/in this same style/using this same imagery?” Like, I try to write about other stuff, in other ways, and use other words/images, but certain things keep coming up over and over. This is a problem I generally have with my writing, but it’s even more prevalent, or at least immediate, when I have to write something every goddamn day. And not only write every day, but share it with the world. It makes you recognize your tendencies real damn fast.
Two years ago, also during NaPoWriMo, I posted the following on my blog:
Me @ me: Write a poem that doesn’t mention birds or the moon or windows or smoke or ghosts or trains (or fucking parking lots) challenge.
Me @ me: Write a poem that doesn’t mention an old flame challenge.
Me @ me: Write a poem that doesn’t have a music (or other pop-culture/subculture) reference in it challenge.
Me @ me: Write a poem that isn’t fifty million lines long challenge.
And this year, things are basically the same. Not so much the fifty million lines long thing (which was, obviously, already hyperbolic), because we have a two-document-page length limit for this 30/30. But everything else? Yeah.
Plus, I’ve realized I could add drugs/alcohol, highways/cars/road trips, leather, streetlights, and the mulberry bush in my backyard to my list of overused imagery and themes. And motels. Once, in a writing workshop I took in 2017, I shared my poem for that day, and one of the other students said: “Oh, we know it’s a Jessie poem if it mentions a motel.”
So, yeah. There are certain things that come up frequently in my poetry (and, let’s be real, in my prose, too), and I try to fight against those impulses, sometimes. But when I have to write a poem every day to be posted the next day, I don’t really have time to break out of my box—I have to write whatever is calling out to me, and often, that’s stuff that’s similar to things I’ve written in the past. And I worry that the reader (o, imaginary Reader) is gonna notice and go: “God, can’t they write about anything else?”
How do I get past it? I reread Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering Town,” and remember:
If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn’t bother me that the word “stone” appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that “wind” and “gray” appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be.
So you are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obsessive musical deed. You are trying to find and develop a way of writing that will be yours and will, as Stafford puts it, generate things to say. Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power. The relation of you to the triggering subject weakens.
Thus ends tonight’s edition of 30/30 (Tortured) Poet’s Problems. I’ll be back tomorrow with more. In the meantime, please consider reading some of the drafts I’ve written this month, and then donating to my fundraiser.
And if you want some great prose to read? Check out my pal Adam’s newest novel, I Wish to Say Lovely Things. I started reading it today and just. Goddamn. His stuff is so true and heartbreaking and beautiful. Three pages in and I was already crying (in the best way). (Also, he has a Substack,
, which you should subscribe to while you’re at it.)